Box scores are deceiving.
The Boston University field hockey team competed against No. 7 Boston College and Northeastern University this weekend. Against the Eagles, they held an 11-9 advantage in shots and a 6-5 edge in penalty corners, while versus the Huskies, their leads in those categories ballooned to 23-4 and 7-1 respectively. The Terriers only won one of the games on the weekend, and it was not the one they dominated statistically.
It may go against the numbers, but the Terriers defeated their archrivals from Chestnut Hill by a score of 2-0 on Friday night to secure the best start in team history at 5-0 before falling to the Huskies 1-0 on Sunday.
"[We were] absolutely successful on Friday night," said BU coach Sally Starr on Sunday. "The bittersweet part of today is that I don't feel we played particularly well, but we still absolutely dominated a very good team."
And they did.
The Terriers held an edge in almost every statistical category on Sunday afternoon but were unable to convert any of their 14 shots on goal, giving Northeastern goalkeeper Lizzie Priest her first shutout of the season.
On the other side of the field, Terrier senior and sophomore goalies Amanda Smith and Julie Collins faced only three shots on net, but the first of the game for the Huskies proved to be the game-winner.
Catching the BU defense on its heels, the Huskies forced a turnover that led to junior forward Carolyn Malloy's second goal of the season. Malloy was able to move the ball with ease after a defensive breakdown and found herself one-on-one with Smith. She deposited a shot from directly in front of the net over Smith and across the goal line. It was the only goal to be scored by either team on the afternoon.
The reason that the lopsided box score of Sunday's game coincided with a loss for the Terriers is because of one statistical category that cannot be firmly determined: quality of shots.
The way someone views the "quality" of a shot can change from person to person, while the category of "shots" is generally straightforward to score. For this reason, it is difficult to see why the Terriers lost a game that they dominated offensively according to the box score.
However, further attention to the details of BU's 23 shots reveals that they were not always very difficult to save. Conversely, although the Huskies only took four shots through 70 minutes, at least one of those shots was virtually unstoppable because of a defensive breakdown by the Terriers, leading to the lone goal.
"I think [Priest] played a very good game for Northeastern," Starr explained. "But I think we also didn't really do a great job challenging her as much as we could have. We put a lot of shots on, but I think we put a lot of very savable shots on net. I think we had some very good balls crossing the circle, but we also had a combination of our players not being ready for them and not fully taking advantage of some opportunities that we had in our attacking circle."
If "quality of shots" were a statistical category, most may agree that BU would have won it as well, but they certainly would not have won it by as much as the shots category. Throw in a solid game by Priest and give the best-quality shot of the game to Malloy&- the only one to be converted&- and it is much easier to understand why the Terriers lost on Sunday.
When the Terriers are, as Starr put it, "in sync," they are a team to be reckoned with.
On Friday night, the Terriers looked as fluid as ever, providing airtight defense throughout the night against a high-scoring Eagles squad and scoring two highlight-reel goals against a goalie who had only allowed one goal on the season prior to the game.
The "quality-of-shot" meter would be going through the roof on junior forward Andrea Greene's one-touch blast in front of the net that doubled the Terriers' lead, leading Starr to call the second goal of the game "absolutely textbook."
The Terriers will look to continue manufacturing good quality shots next Saturday when they travel to Ohio to take on No. 6 Michigan State University.</p>
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
